As a DeFi developer, the oracle component is unavoidable. I've been using Chainlink for nearly two years, and recently another solution has been gaining a lot of discussion in the community. So I deployed both to conduct a practical comparison and found it quite interesting.

The power of Chainlink is undeniable—its ecosystem is mature enough, data sources are extensive, and node stability is top-notch. The lending protocols I built previously used it for price feeds, and in over two years, it rarely had any issues. But the cost, to be honest, is a bit high: each call requires spending LINK tokens, and during peak times on the Ethereum mainnet, a single price update can cost dozens of dollars in Gas. Also, it mainly uses a push model, where oracle nodes periodically push data. For scenarios that don't require high-frequency updates, this can be somewhat wasteful.

The other solution I started testing last month focuses on three main points: supporting pull mode for on-demand calls, optimized for the Bitcoin ecosystem and supporting the Runes protocol, and incorporating an AI-assisted data verification mechanism. In practice, both solutions have their own merits.

The most obvious difference is in cost. I conducted a benchmarking experiment: for the same price data, the first solution pushes updates automatically every hour, totaling 24 times a day; the second is configured to fetch data only when triggered by user transactions, averaging about 8 to 10 calls per day. The Gas fees can differ by more than three times. For projects that are sensitive to costs, this difference is quite significant.